I’ve not been buying that many games this year, but this is one little title from EA’s BioWare I know I must have and play before year’s end. That title is the third game in their fantasy rpg series Dragon Age.
Dragon Age: Inquisitor will mark the arrival of BioWare onto the nextgen platforms (Xbox One, PS4) and looks to combine what was good with the first two titles in the series while trimming off what went wrong with those two.
The game already looks gorgeous from just clips and gameplay videos shown leading up to this release. If the title looks to expand on the world-building that has been laid down by the first two titles in the series then I should expect to be playing this game for at least a minimum of 80 hours, if not more.
Now, I just need to decide on race and class for my character.
“I know you mean well. You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change. There’s only one path to peace…your extinction.” — Ultron
Marvel has released a new extended version of the teaser trailer they released a couple weeks ago. While it’s pretty much similar to the first teaser trailer this extended version has a new intro with Ultron in his initial form confronting the partying Avengers in Avengers Tower. The voice-over by James Spader as Ultron also sounds much different in this trailer than the first. We also get more lingering shots of all the Avengers from Iron Man all the way to Hawkeye rather than the rapid-fire cuts we saw in the first teaser.
May 2015 cannot come soon enough.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is set for a May 1, 2015 release date in North America.
To much fanfare we finally have the teaser trailer to the latest adventures of Dominic Toretto and his band of misfit drivers.
Now officially titled as Furious 7, the latest film in the franchise goes further away from it’s street racing roots and into the spy thriller and superhero genres it drifted into with Fast Five. Even the title alone sounds like a superhero team straight out of Marvel Comics. It’s almost as if I expect to see Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Daredevil and Elektra plus three other furious heroes fighting the good fight.
The teaser pretty much teases the sort of over-the-top, physics-defying action scenes we’ve come to expect from this franchise. It’s almost as if with each new film they up the ante as to how much universal laws Dom and his crew will break in order to entertain it’s massive fan audience.
Furious 7 is set to ride and die this April 3, 2015.
Yes, this was a sequel that we did not see coming. The original film was a good enough piece of zombie horror that brought back some nostalgic feelings of that very obscure zombie subgenre called Nazi zombies. Dead Snow helped put Tommy Wirkola, it’s director, on the map since it earned him the gig to direct the highly-unappreciated Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. The kinetic, gory action from Dead Snow was highly evident in his first Hollywood offering.
Now, it looks like his time with the Nazi zombies (or are they zombie Nazis) wasn’t over as we now have the sequel that’s begun to play in the film festival circuit since the start of 2014. From the trailer shown it looks like Wirkola has turned the gory action past 10 and into 11 for this follow-up.
The comedy looks to be more in the forefront this time around as he introduces a trio of would-be America zombie hunters. What’s a European action horror-comedy be if it didn’t include bumbling, stereotypical Americans. I almost require that they be included in such films.
Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead still hasn’t been given a U.S. theatrical release. It may bypass the theaters in the U.S. altogether and just head straight for home video. Either way be on the look out for Nazi zombies in Tiger I tanks.
Why are bad guys still messing with Liam Neeson…I mean Bryan Mills. He literally took on an Albanian gang in Paris (of all places) who were kidnapping young, female tourists to sell to Parisian sex-slave auctioneer who only did business with a very exclusive clientele. Then the hometown relatives of said Albanian gangsters tried to take him out. That didn’t work out so well.
Now, this coming January just when Bryan thought his life as a retired government worker with a unique set of skills can finally enjoy retirement with his lovely daughter and rekindle his relationship with his ex-wife people are out to be quite the killjoy once again.
Taken 3 will see Liam Neeson back as Bryan Mills, Maggie Grace as his daughter Kimmy and joined by Forest Whitaker as an LAPD inspector tasked with taking him down for a murder he didn’t commit. Once again this sequel will be helmed by that French director with the awesome name: Olivier Megaton.
Some people say Taken 3 (will not call it Tak3n) is just a rehash of The Fugitive, but I disagree. Richard Kimble never broke people’s throats and shot many people in their heads to find those responsible. The throat breaking alone puts Bryan Mills heads above Richard Kimble.
Monsters was this little, low-budget monster film from 2010 by filmmaker Gareth Edwards that got all the film community a-buzzing. Edwards’ work on that film landed him the job on 2014’s reboot of the Godzilla film franchise.
After Monsters was such a success there were plans to make a sequel of it, but Edwards being so busy doing Godzilla, he was unable to get back in the director’s chair and instead it went to Tom Green (not the comedian). We get a sequel that’s less about a romance in the midst of a creeping alien invasion, but one that looks to expand the world building Edwards created for the first film and make it global.
Monsters: Dark Continent is set in the Middle East where the alien infection has spread to and where a U.S. military mission goes in to stem the tide. Making things a tad difficult in a mission already tough to begin with is the rise of a new insurgency in the region.
I liked the first film, but I thought the low-budget really hampered how the monsters were portrayed. Edwards had to tease very brief glimpses of them until the end where he finally gives the audience the big reveal. This style was one of the reasons why I just liked the new Godzilla instead of loving it.
It looks like this sequel forgoes the teases and goes full out reveal of all the alien monsters. I am more than just slightly interested in checking this film out now.
Monsters: Dark Continent is set for a September 26, 2014 release date.
(Above is an exclusive poster found on Collider.com)
I am having a hard time remembering the last time I made a post like this that wasn’t a review, so I think you can use this article as a measure of just how excited I am for ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. I, like a lot of people, was completely surprised by how good ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ was. It rejuvenated a franchise (one I really enjoy) that was most recently tarnished by a really, really bad remake. It was so good that a sequel was not only inevitable, but desired.
Luckily Fox is fulfilling that desire next week with the release of the sequel, which has received universal praise from the few reviews that have already been released. The out-pour of this praise definitely has me more excited than I was beforehand…but it is not the true source of the hype that has me ready to buy a ticket for a Thursday night showing for the first time since ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. No, the source of that hype is a series of short films that act as a bridge between ‘Rise’ and ‘Dawn’, examining (quite artistically, surprisingly) the events that occurred after the outbreak of the Simian Flu at the end of ‘Rise’. These shorts are a collaboration of 20th Century Fox and Motherboard and can be viewed below:
‘Spread of Simian Flu: Before The Dawn of the Apes (Year 1)’ (dir. Isaiah Seret)
‘Struggling to Survive: Before The Dawn of the Apes (Year 5)’ (dir. Daniel Thron)
‘Story of the Gun: Before The Dawn of the Apes (Year 10)’ (dir. “thirtytwo”)
What I love most about these is how they are so unlike most “viral” shorts. These aren’t straight forward stories like you see with the Marvel One-Shots. These are actually artistic, emotional and thought provoking films, to the point in which I saw people commenting on them being pretentious…music to my ears to be honest with you. Each explore themes of their own while also wonderfully adding to the atmosphere and mythos of the new ‘Apes’ series. Furthermore, the very fact that the studio clearly gave the writers and directors of each liberty to not “play it safe” with a piece of marketing revolving around a multi-million dollar franchise just gives me a ton of confidence in the franchise on the whole. It is this, more than the reviews, that has me excited to see ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ next week, and maybe they will do the same for you.
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Along with the prequel shorts, which are directly related to the events of the film, they also released a documentary which can be seen below. It too is incredibly well made, and is a surprisingly poignant true story of apes and human interactions during and after the events of medical testing and human warfare.
Last summer’s surprise hit, The Purge, was something that ended up being better than it should’ve been. Using a premise that the United States of America has a yearly 12-hour event where all crimes are legal in order for the population to vent their frustrations was an interesting one. The fact that this event was cooked up by what the film calls America’s Second Founding Fathers was a nice touch.
The film itself started well enough but ended up becoming another take on the home invasion trope. At least, the box office success of the film meant a sequel was quickly greenlit. What we have with The Purge: Anarchy takes the original film’s premise and goes much wider in scope and scale. Instead of the film using a home invasion premise we now go the “Most Dangerous Game” route. If we’re to believe what the latest trailer is showing it’s that the Purge Event might be something cooked up by those rich and powerful.
We also have the very awesome Frank Grillo channeling his inner Frank Castle and using the Purge event to find those who killed his son in the year’s previous Purge.
This sequel has me more excited for it than I probably should, but if the film pulls off half of what this trailer promises then I’ll be satisfied.
Oh, if The Purge was real then people better not be trying to give me a visit because I’m ready.
One of my most-anticipated films this summer of 2014 has released it’s latest trailer and it shows the central conflict which will drive this sequel to 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
It’s been many years since the pandemic from the “simian flu” tore through the planet as shown during the end credits of the first film. Now the surviving humans must now contend with the growing population of hyper-intelligent apes led by Caesar from the first film.
While the first film showed the rise of Caesar as a revolutionary leader it looks like this sequel will now put him in the role of war leader as his apes must now gear up for a war with the surviving humans that can’t seem to be avoided.
Plus, all I can say is this: Apes on horses with assault rifles.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is set for a July 11, 2014 release date.
It’s just less than a month away from one of 2014’s most-anticipated films. It’s the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger and Marvel Studios has been kind enough to treat it’s fans to a 4-minute clip/trailer of the film.
This clip from Captain America: The Winter Soldier comes early in the film and helps in setting the tone of the film. This is not the gung-ho and patriotic first film. This follow-up shows the after-effects of the events from The Avengers and how it’s created a sense of paranoia and conspiracy surrounding the very group Captain America has now become a part of.
Where the first film had the nostalgic feel similar to Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer, this sequel looks to tap the 70’s conspiracy and 80’s technothriller genres. It’s anyone’s guess whether the Russo Brothers succeeded, but just going by this extended scene and the previous teasers and trailers they may have just done that.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier arrives in North America on April 4, 2014.
Through the Shattered Lens 